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They say they're removing three things:

- the built-in feed preview feature

- the "live bookmarks" support

- the subscription UI

They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third.

Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online feed reader, I think that's a great shame.

Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to replace the old subscription UI.



One of the justifications from the article:

> feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.

I'm curious the source of this data, seeing as I've switched to Firefox due to privacy concerns.


It's a silly justification anyway, as far as "feed previews" go: you preview a feed when you're thinking of subscribing to it, which isn't expected to be an everyday sort of action.

I hope they wouldn't consider removing the option to select which application to use to open a particular file type, or to install an add-on, based on the percentage of sessions which use it.


Telemetry: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report

Edit: I just found out that you can look at the collected data at about:telemetry


Can the telemetry data be rigged? Are there anti-rigging measures in place?


Lol, you think there's a click farm out there installing Firefox on thousands of VMs for the express purpose of throwing off Mozilla Telemetry?


Presumably it is from the users who didn't turn off usage data reporting.


I'm guessing that their numbers come from people who don't switch off their telemetry. So even if you use RSS, if you don't let them know it, you won't be counted. They're not mind-readers.


Maybe because people use Firefox to avoid being spied on by google?


Yeah, couldn't find an add-on that works well enough for that, I now simply c&p the website URL into inoreader.


Also, an extension would need to be able to read the content of all sites to work. For such a simple task, it seems overkill.


XUL extensions could always do that. The could also encrypt your files and demand ransom. Did anyone ever complain? No.

It's required. No way around that.




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